Bugs found with operating the CT-PC89E

This page contains a record of problems found so far with the CT-PC89E, a very new design of ARM 8.9in netbook. As they are corrected, the issues will be removed.

Starting "appliaction" spelling mistake

Plastic button activiating Reset pushed in (!) after use only about ten times. still works but care now needed.

No lid "sleep" system, so LCD stays active after lid is closed

machine left on overnight resulted in "LCD burn" probably due to kernel crash resulted in brightness of LCD being pushed beyond limits (a common problem on embedded systems). can only really be fixed by a hardware watchdog timer, resulting in power-down.

layout of filesystem is not FHS compliant.

kernel modules have been moved to /drivers instead of /usr/lib/modules/2.6.24.2/kernel/drivers

debian packages on MOS mid-fun operating system violate FHS and standard debian policy: many packages install identical files TWICE, some of which are in an indentical file-structure under /READONLY_FS.

kernel modules compiled into the kernel are still present in /drivers, causing segfaults in some cases

on 3G dialup (USB modem used by adam), again it fails. kernel source DEFINITELY needed.

root password was cracked within 4 days, by running "john" on /etc/passwd, and found to be "mos2010"

/etc and many other files are owned by midfun not root, making it unnecessary to have performed the crack: just edit /etc/passwd

/sbin/udevd and other applications run as root are owned by midfun, allowing them to be replaced and perform root operations under user control.

screen brightness control is non-linux-compliant: there is no standard entry (that could be found) in /proc or /sys for the LCD brightness, making it impossible to use standard linux applications and distributions.

the built-in microphone doesn't seem to work, or if it does, the kernel drivers are borked and don't make it available under ACPI. speakers work fine though.

21mar2010 report from fjp

mouse trackpad was inoperable when machine started up when low on battery. inserting power cable, mouse trackpad was fine.

was unable to connect to my IMAP server; AFAICT no SSL support

I played an AVI (a 2005 episode of Doctor Who) on it; fairly good, but not great; there were some freezes, probably due to buffer underruns

while playing the AVI with headphone plugged in there was a fairly loud hiss from the internal speaker

there seems to be some flash support: it loads, but when playing all I got was a "DEMO" logo instead of the actual content

Application manager allows to install some additional packages, but installation of gnome-games resulted in errors (unrecognized format of SVG files) when trying to play them. Missing dependency I guess.

Loads of funny spelling errors (to say nothing about some of the phrases):

- PowerManagaer

- PowerManager Eanble

- FALSH (instead of FLASH)

evbug is compiled in causing major spam of dmesg (making it unusable). It is also a security issue as it means all keystrokes get logged. And it probably reduces performance somewhat.